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Player-Character Is What You Are in the Dark: The Phenomenology of Immersion in Dungeons & Dragons

William J. White

The idea of role-playing makes some people nervous – even some people who play role-playing games (RPGs). Yeah, sure, we pretend to be wizards and talk in funny voices, such players often say. So what? It’s just for fun. It’s not like it means anything. These players tend to find talk about role-playing games being “art” to be pretentious nonsense, and the idea that there could be philosophical value in a game like Dungeons & Dragons strikes them as preposterous on its face. “RPGs as instruction on ethics or metaphysics?” writes one such player in an online forum for discussing role-playing games. “Utter intellectualoid [sic] bullshit … [from those] who want to imagine they’re great thinkers thinking great thoughts while they play RPGs because they’d otherwise feel ashamed about pretending to be an elf.”¹

By the same token, people who don’t play RPGs are often quite mystified about what could possibly be going on in a game of Dungeons & Dragons: There’s no board? How do you win? No winners? Then why do you play?² Making sense of D&D as an experience can require a good deal of mental effort on the part of the uninitiated, perhaps because of how RPGs weave together the concepts of story and game in an unfamiliar way.

But it is exactly that weaving together that makes Dungeons & Dragons interesting from a philosophical standpoint. Philosopher Kendall Walton argues that representation in fictional works has always proceeded from a playful or “ludic” orientation.³ All fiction is a game of make-believe, so the first narrative form to make that connection explicit (as RPGs do) is necessarily worth exploring. And the foregrounding of game over story that begins with the tabletop RPG carries over to D&D-inspired digital and online games as well as electronic literature more broadly. Understanding how Dungeons & Dragons does what it does can provide insight into the operation of what some are calling participatory culture,⁴ meaning that sort of industrious fandom in which the activity of the audience is more than mere reception, but an active and productive engagement with popular culture. From this perspective, D&D shares an important feature with writing Harry Potter fan fiction, playing World of Warcraft, and dressing up for Twilight cosplay: all of these instances of participatory culture facilitate an immersive engagement with a fictional setting through the lens of character. If we can explain immersion, in other words, then we can talk about role-playing in general and Dungeons & Dragons in particular in a way that both the novice and the skeptical “grognard” (old-school player) can appreciate.

The Idea of Immersion Leads to Phenomenology

So the idea of immersion is central to understanding how Dungeons & Dragons and other aspects of participatory culture work. Indeed, it can be argued that “immersion is to the 21st-century entertainment industry what illusion was to that of the 20th.”⁵ Game designers and social scientists alike have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what immersion is, how it operates, and how to achieve it. Immersion is a sprawling concept, understood as having to do with being engrossed in the play of a game, or identifying strongly with a character in a story, or feeling as if one were in some sense present in an imaginary setting, for example. It is sometimes associated with psychologist Michael Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow,” in which “optimal experience” is achieved when an undertaking challenges but doesn’t overwhelm us.⁶ Discussions of immersion among gamers can at times be heated, because of the varying and incompatible definitions held by different people.⁷

The one thing that isn’t responsible for immersion, according to game design gurus Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, is the increasingly realistic representation of an imaginary setting by technological means – even though some game developers talk as if this were the case. For example, a bit of this view can be seen even in digital media professor Janet Murray’s definition of immersion as “the experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place” (emphasis added).⁸ Salen and Zimmerman call this the “immersive fallacy,” and argue that immersion is located instead in the minds of the players, in their experience of play, rather than in the technological sophistication, verisimilitude, the “realism” of the medium.⁹ Once we begin to see immersion as a function of the game-player’s subjective experience, rather than of the technical means used to create that experience, the door is opened to a phenomenological approach to immersion.

What Is Phenomenology?

Phenomenology is a kind of “philosophy of mind” associated with the works of twentieth-century philosophers Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), among others. The word “phenomenology,” coined by Husserl, depends upon the sense of the word “phenomenon” that means “appearances” or “perceptions,” since phenomenology is interested in the world as it is perceived, or “things as they appear in our experience.”¹⁰

The purpose of phenomenology is to describe what it is like to be conscious or to have a given experience. To the phenomenological perspective, “all problems amount to finding definitions of essences,”¹¹ which means that the accounts of lived consciousness that the phenomenologist creates are presented as general descriptions of categories of experience – their essence, that is to say – rather than reconstructions of specific events. The domain of phenomenology encompasses the entire range of experiences in the world, paying attention to what Husserl called “intentionality,” or how our consciousness is directed toward particular objects in the world. All consciousness, we are told repeatedly by the phenomenological philosophers, is consciousness of something. Phenomenology is thus a sort of reflexive consciousness, a consciousness of consciousness.

So the phenomenologist would ask, What is it like to role-play? or What is it like to be immersed in a role-playing game? The first step in most phenomenological analysis is a sort of attitude check called the epoche, or reduction of the “natural attitude” (i.e., the “general positing of existence” that presumes there is a real world that determines what is experienced). This involves bracketing the question of what is “real” or what is “really there” in favor of focusing on describing the individual’s subjective, lived experience, without stipulating anything about their reality or irreality. Jean-Paul Sartre says “This procedure is … a ‘step back’ from belief concerning what exists in nature… . In ‘stepping backward’ one does not contest any factual belief… . Rather, one ‘steps back’, as it were, from the ‘natural viewpoint’ of factual belief.”¹² Phenomenology is thus agnostic about the nature of reality; as Sartre says, “little importance is attached to whether the individual fact which serves as underpinning to the essence is real or imaginary.”¹³

Having made this reduction or epoche, the phenomenologist then interrogates the data, which in classical phenomenology was usually the personal experience of the phenomenologist. Today phenomenological assumptions and approaches have been adopted by researchers in sociology, psychology, anthropology, and communication studies. So, they may include all manner of qualitative (descriptive) sources, such as “interviews, conversations, participant observation, action research, focus meetings, and analysis of personal texts.”¹⁴ This “interrogation” amounts to looking for recurring themes, patterns, or motifs in the way that the experience is described, focusing on the act of experiencing or the perception of phenomena.

In our case, we are interested in examining accounts of playing Dungeons & Dragons for what they suggest about the nature or character of immersion. For data, we’ll use published accounts of play from a variety of sources – memoirs, short stories, magazine articles, online discussions, and scholarly essays – to see what common elements emerge, and how they contribute to a notion of immersion.

Seeing Is Believing: Immersion as Visualization

The “problem of the player-character” is central to many discussions of role-playing, so a good place to begin may be with an act of reflecting upon the character one plays in the game. Here is an excerpt from Sam Lipsyte’s 2010 New Yorker short story “The Dungeon Master,” about a group of misfit teenage D&D players. The narrator is thinking about his character, having returned home after an afternoon’s session of play.

Today my ranger nearly got the snippo. A giant warthog jumped him in the woods. Is there even a warthog in the game manual? My ranger – his name is Valium, just to tease Marco – cut the beast down, but lost a lot of hit points. Even now, I can picture him bent over a brook, cupping water onto his wounds. Later, he rests in the shade of an oak. The warthog crackles on a spit.¹⁵

There is a lot going on in this excerpt! There is a distance between player and character – “my ranger,” the narrator says, not “I” or “me” – and the character is clearly a construct of the game, having had his “hit points” reduced by a beast that may or may not have come from the official game manual. And yet these game-mechanical elements take on a diegetic (fictional) reality: the narrator understands the lost hit points to be wounds, the damage-dealing antagonist to be a meaty food source – the spoils of victory. And the euphemism “the snippo” for the character’s avoided in-game death, taken up from an earlier use in the story, highlights the concern with (character) mortality that is a theme of Lipsyte’s story and a feature of role-playing itself.

But what is important for our purposes is the act of player visualization that Lipsyte describes here so skillfully. In a moment outside the play of the game itself, the player reflects upon the character, and imagines him recovering from his battle and quietly enjoying his triumph, safe for the moment. It is that moment of visualization that some players regard as the essence of immersion. It may, however, be hard to achieve, as is suggested by a post on an online discussion forum about tabletop RPGs:

I’ve been making an effort at visualization – I’ve been consciously building a picture in my head. I think to myself “What could my character see from here?” I deliberately fill in details – “Can I see the sky from here?” I ask the GM for more as I realize there are gaps – “What is the ground made of here, anyway?” Results from the first three sessions are good – I’ve seen more impressive pictures than I’ve ever seen instinctively. More than that – I’ve managed the sound of the salt river grinding nearby, damp wind in my face, the feel of weathered tiles under my hand. I’ve never had that in RPGs before. So far, this has been pretty rewarding – almost magical at times.¹⁶

The fact that this is presented as an atypical approach to play, or at least one that requires some effort, invites us to ask about typical modes of play if visualization of in-game events is not that mode. The question of imagination is a tricky one in the phenomenological philosophy of mind.¹⁷ Philosophers argue over the nature of “mental images” associated with visualization – what are people seeing when they visualize something, and how are those visualizations related to perception, if at all? More broadly, what if anything unites all of the different senses in which we may be said to “imagine” something: as supposition or speculation, as fantasy or daydream, as hallucination or error, and so forth? Some philosophers want to avoid having to explain the nature of mental images (are they objects of consciousness, or by-products of it?) by defining imagination as fundamentally an act of description, involving the formulation of propositions about things that may be merely absent or entirely unreal. However, these linguistic approaches are not wholly satisfying, because they do not seem to do the phenomenon justice on several levels.

Nonetheless, it’s important to recognize that role-playing does in fact have a non-visual dimension that may in fact be more characteristic than the visual one. The question is, is that non-visual element imaginative? Is it immersive?

Am I My Character? Immersion and Identification

The answer seems to be yes, on both counts. In her book about how tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons create narrative, Jennifer Grouling Cover describes a kind of immersion that seems to hinge upon her identification with her character. She recounts an incident from a game in which she played where a conflict between her character, Whisper, and Whisper’s companions led to Whisper fleeing from them, being chased, and finding temporary succor before the inevitable confrontation:

While Whisper was in the cottage attempting to sleep, as a player, I was temporarily removed from the rest of the Sorpraedor group [i.e., her fellow players]. As I awaited my turn, I wrote the following in my personal blog: “For those that don’t play, I can’t really explain it to you. But I’ve had a total adrenaline rush going since about 4:00. The tension, the excitement . . . all maxed out. It’s amazing. And the story. Oh, my god . . . the story is so good [ellipsis and emphasis in original].¹⁸

What Cover seems to find engaging about the game is the way that her decisions on behalf of her character and those of the other players on behalf of theirs interact to create an engrossing fiction. “The scene involving the conflict between Whisper and David [another character] was extremely suspenseful because the number of paths [i.e., choices available to the characters] seemed significantly reduced. The relationship between these characters had degenerated to the point where it seemed clear that one of them must go, but not knowing which one or how the conflict would go down was incredibly suspenseful for those involved.”¹⁹

Character identification of this sort seems to rely on a kind of distance from the character, rather than an undifferentiated total identity with the character. This relationship seems to fall somewhere between that of the author to his or her protagonist (which is very complicated, as literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin has noted, a combination of proprietary ownership and critical commentary²⁰) and that of a person to the social roles her or she enacts in daily life (which sometimes feels like play-acting, as sociologist Erving Goffman has pointed out²¹). As Ethan Gilsdorf notes in his account of fantasy role-playing culture, “we all engage in some form of minor dress-up and role-playing. At a wedding or a cocktail party, on a first date or during a job interview, or when home for the holidays, we all dress the part and adopt another character: Witty or Well-Adjusted, Stockbroker or Salesman, Happy or Perfect. Unless you’re not willing to play along and put on a mask, friends will say, ‘You’re not yourself. What’s wrong?’ Who, indeed, are you, if you’re not you?”²² This is an insight at which many D&D players arrive.

Alea and Immersion: The Role of the Dice

We have barely begun to scratch the surface of a complete phenomenological description of role-playing, but one last point needs to be made before concluding this chapter. Thus far, we have focused on the personal, psychological aspects of immersion in Dungeons & Dragons. But the game is social and interactive, and mediated by the forces of chance – what sociologist of play Roger Caillois calls “alea.”²³ Here’s an account of play that illustrates this idea, taken from an article written by one of the early editors of Dungeons & Dragons for the readers of Psychology Today. The Dungeon Master has determined that one of the characters in his game, a paladin, has been captured by monsters from outer space and imprisoned in a dark tower on a far-off world.

The paladin [character] came to in a bare cell … . Dave [the player] … knew he was in big trouble, confronting a fate that is really worse than death. “What are you going to do?” I asked … . “I’m going to get down on my knees and pray real hard.” It was an entirely appropriate response for the virtuous knight, but it was one I had not anticipated … . I explained that a die roll near 100 was required for an answer to his prayers. With the players holding their breath, Dave threw the polyhedrons: 99! The challenge was now mine … “Poised in the air is a huge angel … [who] seizes you in his arms and flies up and away … The angel gently descends to earth … . ‘There. Now keep your nose clean.’ He’s gone.” To my delight the players said, “Wow.” I had managed to successfully obey the imperatives of our joint imaginary creation. The dice never lie.²⁴

To the Dungeon Master, the player’s successful die roll was a challenge. Could he come up with a suitably dramatic but believable act of divine intervention – deus ex machina, indeed! – in response to the paladin’s prayers? The dice serve as another voice in the game whose input guides the outcome of events, at time oracularly. We know that dice loom large in players’ accounts of the game and in their superstitions about play. But this episode shows how rolling the dice operates to create the feeling of a world in motion around the players and their characters, a “joint imaginary creation” rather than the sole vision of one person or another.

For Tyros and Grognards

In this brief overview of the phenomenology of Dungeons & Dragons, we’ve seen how visualization is secondary to character identification as a mechanism for immersion, an adjunct rather than a fundamental aspect. We’ve suggested that character identification operates in the space between the player and the character, and noted that the social and interactive qualities of Dungeons & Dragons are enhanced by the role that the dice play in allowing the game-world to “speak” for itself at the table. A complete phenomenology of role-playing would delve further into all of these issues, and could conceivably help phenomenological philosophers make some headway toward understanding imagination phenomenologically! More important for our purposes, however, is that a phenomenology of Dungeons & Dragons may help tyros figure out the game, and grognards appreciate its depths.

Notes

1. John Tarnowski, Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy (2012). Available at http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=22622. Accessed Nov. 28, 2012.

2. Sephka, Somebody Explain Dungeons and Dragons To Me (2003). Available at http://www.head-fi.org/t/48636/someone-explain-dungeons-and-dragons-to-me. Accessed Nov. 28, 2012.

3. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

4. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

5. Evan Torner and William J. White. Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-playing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), p. 3.

6. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1st edn. (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).

7. William J. White, J. Tuomas Harviainen, and Emily Care Boss. “Role-Playing Communities, Cultures of Play, and the Discourse of Immersion,” in Evan Torner and William J. White, eds., Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-Playing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), pp. 71–86.

8. Janet Horowitz Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 98.

9. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 453.

10. David Woodruff Smith, “Phenomenology,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “What Is Phenomenology?”, in Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, eds., The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 55.

12. Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 158–159 n. 4.

13. Ibid., p. 128.

14. Stan Lester, “An Introduction to Phenomenological Research” (1999). Available at http://www.sld.demon.co.uk/resmethy.pdf. Accessed Nov. 3, 2012.

15. Sam Lipsyte, “The Dungeon Master,” New Yorker, Oct. 4, 2010, p. 88.

16. R. Alexander, “Skills for You-Are-There Immersion,” in Story Games: Tabletop Roleplaying 2.0. Available at http://www.story-games.com/forums/discussion/17472/skills-for-you-are-there-immersion. Accessed Nov. 4, 2012.

17. Lilly-Marlene Russow, “Some Recent Work on Imagination,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978), pp. 57–66.

18. Jennifer Grouling Cover, The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), p. 106.

19. Ibid., p. 110.

20. M.M. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, eds., Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 4–256.

21. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays in Dace-to-Face Behavior (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), and Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).

22. Ethan Gilsdorf, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2009), p. 59.

23. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

24. John Eric Holmes, “Confessions of a Dungeon Master,” Psychology Today (Nov. 1980), pp. 84–94.